Kentucky Teachers Demand $3,200 From Each Family for Pension Funding

It’s not enough that public school teachers are paid to condition your children to accept the worldview of the people in power, they want more. They want your money, bigly, in perpetuity, to pay for their golden parachutes. The teachers are the public school teachers of the State of Kentucky. The money they want us to fund their pension program, a pension program that far exceeds what mere non-government people could ever hope to get working comparable jobs. I do want to add this caveat to this story. This is NOT a personal attack on teachers in the public school system. Obviously, they do not view the world in the same way that I do. They see their work not as conditioning children to accept the worldview of the people in power but of preparing them to operate in a world that, to them is just fine the way that is. Either way, Kentucky teachers wishing to hoist on the citizens of Kentucky this kind of massive bill will garner little sympathy from me.

….it should come as no surprise at all that the Lexington Herald Leader reported today that Kentucky’s 365,000 teachers and other public employees are now demanding that taxpayers contribute a staggering $5.4 billion to their insolvent ponzi schemes over the next two years alone. To put that number in perspective, $5.4 billion is roughly $3,200 for each household in the state of Kentucky and 25% of the state’s entire budget over a two-year period.

Kentucky’s General Assembly will need to find an estimated $5.4 billion to fund the pension systems for state workers and school teachers in the next two-year state budget, officials told the Public Pension Oversight Board on Monday.

That amount would be a hefty funding increase and a painful squeeze for a state General Fund that — at about $20 billion over two years — also is expected to pay for education, prisons, social services and other state programs.

“We realize this challenge is in front of us. That’s obviously part of the need for us to address pension reform,” said state Sen. Joe Bowen, R-Owensboro, co-chairman of the oversight board.

“In the short-term, yeah, we’re obligated to find this money,” Bowen said. “And everybody is committed to do that. We have revealed this great challenge. We have embraced this great challenge, as opposed to previous members of the legislature, perhaps.”

In presentations on Monday, the pension oversight board was told that total employer contributions for KRS in Fiscal Years 2019 and 2020 would be an estimated $2.47 billion each year, up from $1.52 billion in the current fiscal year. Nearly $995 million of that would be owed by local governments. The remaining $1.48 billion is what the state would owe.

The Teachers’ Retirement System estimated that it would need a total of $1.22 billion in Fiscal Year 2019 and $1.22 billion in Fiscal Year 2020. That would include not only an additional $1 billion to pay down the system’s unfunded liabilities but also $139 million to continue paying the debt service on a pension bond that won’t be paid off until the year 2024.

Of course, the $5.4 billion will do absolutely nothing to avoid an inevitable failure of Kentucky’s pension system but what the hell…

As we’ve said before, the problem is that the aggregate underfunded liability of pensions in states like Kentucky have become so incredibly large that massive increases in annual contributions, courtesy of taxpayers, can’t possibly offset liability growth and annual payouts. All the while, the funding for these ever increasing annual contributions comes out of budgets for things like public schools even though the incremental funding has no shot of fixing a system that is hopelessly “too big to bail.”

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv